A flying car ventured through a busy lane surrounded by ambitious construction projects. Eight months after the civilians returned to shuffle back into the fold of resurrected casualties of the Artificial Human conflict as well as the converted people returned to their ordinary condition. It only took eight months for West City to start dreaming big again. Rise toward the top and look to pierce through the skies.
People never stopped dreaming. Despite the significant lack of skyscrapers to provide a backdrop to their soaring Thursday drives, the citizens drove high and fast. To them, life had returned to its natural tracks. Thus, they didn't ask too much about how it all happened, they didn't second guess the fact that a bunch of people came back to life. A chubby office clerk stepped out of the car and rushed into the diner, bolting right past a pair of chums just chatting about.
"Didn't you used to be a dog?" one of them asked before taking a slurp of their protein smoothie from a strawberry straw.
"Yeah, it stopped being the fad, so I asked Puri & Co to change me into a human-type cyborg," the other casual-looking fellow waved his hand before pinching a handful of fries with his index and middle fingers and stuffing them into his mouth.
"There aren't many animal-type people around these days… Pretty much everyone must've also gone for becoming human-type cyborgs, I guess…" the first client of the diner observed.
"Yeah, I was worried that when I get transformed back by the magical wish-granting dragon, he'd turn me back into an animal-type again. That's why I didn't want to get reverted at first. But then I kind of missed junk food, so I just paid Capsule Corps to de-convert me. I'm not sure how much that magical dragon charged people, but I guess I got suckered…" the second one sighed and found a seat to place his large serving of Capsule Fries on.
"Oh yeah… I heard Capsule Corps is doing those surgeries these days! How'd it go…?" the first one found his seat alongside his friend, shuffling into the fold of a bustling diner crowd while the chubby office clerk approached the counter where an oversized man in a fast-food joint uniform that was barely holding on to someone his size was poking and prodding the cash register.
"Welcome to Capsule Burger, we'll cook it up and get it laid in between your buns with a Hoi-Poi toy on top…" the muscle-bound goliath appeared to be in physical pain from having to chant the jingle with the amount of cheer that's been demanded of him.
"I'd like an Almond Salad Special, just a warning though, I'm terribly allergic to greases such as animal fat or oil of any kind," the chubby office worker pointed with his index finger at the poster offering a discount on the Almond Salad Special.
"Why would you say such a thing if you know I will disembowel you?" the bulky alien leaned his balding head to the right while stroking his strand-thin fu-manchu-style mustache.
"Is there a problem…?" the office clerk stepped back a few steps.
"The Almond Salad Special includes almond oil, olive oil, the Hoi-Poi Sauce that's essentially Earthling mayonnaise with herbs and spices, and, in case you have short-sightedness which is alarmingly common amongst meek, fat Earthlings, this is a respectable burger joint, so every corner and every utensil and every product, whether or not we like it, is soaked in burger juice!" the Saiyan slammed his hands on the counter, crushing the cashier under his iron slap like a stack of toothpicks under falling rocks. Seeing the counter crumble before his very eyes, the Saiyan stepped over the wreckage to creep up on the Earthling that made him lose his cool while punching his open palm and grinding his teeth.
Before the oversized Saiyan fast-food worker could squeeze the office clerk into a thin thread-like a tube of toothpaste and tie his remains up into a pretty little knot, he realized that a blast of fresh air was flushing over his face. While the suddenness of the motion shocked the burly extraterrestrial warrior, the tunneling gale of wind made his swelling, wrathful expression smoothen up and pacify into a face of nothing but mere curiosity.
"Now look what you made me do!" a feminine voice slashed through the Saiyan's neurons as a bow rubbed against the violin strings. Before the rowdy Saiyan could become accustomed to being on a massive, hi-tech spaceship, the woman pinched his ears and began pulling him away. "You made me beam my own establishment! I thought I told you guys not to make me do that! The beaming can still use some work!"
The worst part about this was that the Saiyan couldn't do much about this she-devil with cerulean hair. She was the king's mate and thus she was as untouchable as the king himself. Then again, Saiyan queens would've handled their business, but this mare was no Saiyan queen. She was one of those frail Earthlings, but that only made the king that much more protective of her. No… Spinachu the Saiyan would've much rather challenged the king for his throne than hurt his queen. Thus, he had to accept manhandling, and she was as rough with the people as she was with their king.
The rooms and walls shifted about while Bulma tapped the front of her heels against the floor of the Capsule Corps star, waiting for Vegeta's training chamber to turn to her as the formation of the planetoid re-configured before her. Once Vegeta's training chamber turned to her, the wall slid open and the gravity de-activated at once while Bulma strut into the chamber. Vegeta hovered for a second before taking it to the ground and catching a towel to wipe the sweat off his forehead.
"This lout nearly killed an Earthling over a menial work dispute! This is getting out of control, Vegeta, this is the fourth incident today! I can't have ten minutes of work done without having to break up the kindergarten your people are causing!" Bulma yelled while gnashing her teeth. "I thought the deal was that you guys would try to fit in and live like Earthlings for as long as you stay here!"
"Get off my back, woman," Vegeta reared his canines. "Saiyans are a warrior race. You can't expect them to become tame and behave themselves overnight. Manners may be inherent in the royal family and the high-class elite of the Saiyan society, but low-class trash like this one can't be expected to act courtly overnight."
"My name is Spinachu, my king…" the groveling Saiyan bellowed, still submitting to Bulma's manhandling.
"Shut up…" Vegeta snarled, picking his subordinate off of Bulma's hands and flinging him nonchalantly to the other side of the gravity room so that the oversized lump of muscle and flesh slammed into the wall hard enough for his eyes to pop out from their sockets before flopping on his face helpless. "You Earthling drove should be more grateful to us. We helped you save your planet. We've earned an accidental casualty or two since we've easily saved dozens of times the amount of worthless, weakling lives that we'd take on any given day."
"Overnight!? It's been over a year since you all settled down on Earth!" Bulma thrashed about. "There's not a single day that someone doesn't destroy something, your people don't accept our laws, they constantly complain about accidents they cause!"
"You can't expect a Saiyan to keel over and accept Earthling arrest. Their handcuffs are too brittle for a Saiyan to get the clue about and their law enforcement is a joke," Vegeta crossed his arms and turned away. "How is an elite warrior race supposed to just stay behind bars in a chamber of paper-thin walls? They can sneeze your pathetic prisons away."
"Then you have to maintain order!" Bulma hammered her fists down while getting madder and madder at the lack of progress she's made with her husband and his people ever since they've begun settling on Earthling cities alongside the locals. With the amount of social change of dead people coming back to life, people turning to cyborgs and then turning back over the span of one year, their entire society and planet nearly getting destroyed, the time couldn't have been better to gradually introduce the Saiyans into the Earthling society. "You're their king!"
"This is order by Saiyan standards…" Vegeta turned his nose up, refusing to admit that his wife had a point. "A Saiyan takes what they can. If the Earthling law enforcement cannot restrain them, it's their fault for being so pathetically weak."
"Ugh… Why can't you lot be more like Chayote… She's learned our ways, settled down. She even started her own company. I was glad to teach her everything I knew because she was willing to learn and step over her nature as a Saiyan, unlike all of you freeloaders!" Bulma became a thrashing whirl of destruction and chaos, tossing about, smashing, and stomping Vegeta's training equipment.
"I… I actually found myself a job at a local meat factory, my queen," Spinachu slowly began picking himself up and peeling his face off the ground.
"Hmph… You should be embarrassed. Providing meat is a pathetic job for women and old people…" Vegeta snarled at his subject, shaking his fist out in front of him as a warning for a greater pounding to come.
"At least he has a job… What's your excuse?" Bulma stabbed at Vegeta with her gaze while crossing her arms with sass.
"Now you're just mocking me, woman. I'm a king. That is my job…" Vegeta shrugged. "And it's a full-time job at that, so I've just about had it up to here with you. Go tinker with scrap or whatever it is you do while I rule my people."
"Ugh…" Bulma dragged her hand across her face while shaking. She's been through an entire year of exactly this while having to restore the Capsule Corps' stocks and its reputation. After all, Puri & Co was an off-shoot and reportedly had tight relation to Capsule Corps and that company pretty much destroyed the entire world and converted everyone into machines while building a cyber-army to hassle those that haven't yet been turned into machines.
"My queen… Can you please beam me down? I must mend my relationship with my client. I've cooled down and I promise not to stomp him to mush like the berry that makes your fermented and fizzy alcoholic drinks," Spinachu clapped his hands together and bowed.
"You look pathetic, groveling like this with that clown uniform…" Vegeta hissed, turning his back on his subject.
"I'll do this right next time, ma'am!" Spinachu fell to his knees and brought his head to the ground. Bulma's expression eased up and lost all traces of red while she exhaled the boiling wrath from her chest at once. "You Earthlings and your food allergies confuse me. You go to eat at burger factories even if burgers are lethally poisonous to you. Is this some sort of natural selection method of practical suicide to cull the weak?"
"Just do whatever the client tells you. As far as your job is concerned, the client is king so heed their orders," Bulma pointed her index at the baffled Saiyan brute before calling up a control panel and typing in a command that beamed the Saiyan off to the Earth from the Capsule Corps star.
"I could've killed him for you, you know. Never be afraid to ask me that," Vegeta rolled his eyes.
"What's the point in killing someone I'm almost done teaching something to?" Bulma shook her head, realizing that her husband had the thickest skull out of all the Saiyans living on Earth.
"Enter!" the King's authoritative voice called out to the men waiting behind his door for permission to walk in. Upon being called, the men promptly entered the room and stopped by the other end of the long table. The King sat on the other side of the room with his fluffy fingers weaved together and a mortified expression.
The men that walked into his room looked little different from most men working in the military security business, except for perhaps their vast difference in sizes and their somewhat exotic hairdos. It was tough to tell anything specific about them from their black suits and ties and shades. One of them had a briefcase that was too large to be containing documents. Moreover, it appeared to be an older model of brown leather briefcase rather than the slick metal or plastic one, more akin to something a family would take on a trip rather than something containing top-secret projects about to be pitched to the King of the World.
One of King's guards had a leather belt stretching across his face with a black, cyber-style vizor covering his right eye. The moment that the two gentlemen entered the room, the modified eye of the King's security personnel activated displaying an array of numbers that relayed complex electromagnetic activity resonating off of the two enigmatic guests and their leathery briefcase.
"You are… Artificial Humans?" Parbo inquired, raising his plasma rifle and aiming the end of its barrel at the two entrants.
"Cybernetically enhanced. Not unlike many these days," one of the two entrants nodded. The man had a white mullet running down the back of his head, which may have been the only noteworthy feature of this plain-looking individual.
"The King has no policy against meeting with cyborgs, does he?" the second man, a taller man of broader shoulders and a braid to top off his black hair wondered, lowering his shades to hang loosely on his nose while he revealed amber-colored eyes underneath that gazed at the King and his security party inquisitively.
"No. There is no problem with cyborgs. It's just that it is rare for someone to deliberately choose to remain a cyborg after being offered the choice to revert to their normal body and Capsule Corps offering the service as well…" Parbo relented, relaxing his itchy trigger finger and lowering the gun but only after the King gave him a wary stare from down below. "Most people have had their fill with robots, cyborgs, and Androids…"
"You came here to pitch an idea to the King about something, right?" another uniformed security guard asked the pair to get to the point already. Once in a while, the guard's gaze lowered to catch the sight of a toy peeking out from the front pocket of the larger man's suit. A purple, round-headed doll with plump lips and shades. It looked rather freaky and plastic, though its jingly and articulate joints suggested it to be a goofy toy, like one of those large-headed, well-articulated, jingly skeleton toys.
"That is correct. We were hoping to run something by the King so that we might use some of the government resources and possibly the access to the Capsule Corps laboratories," the white-haired mullet-man raised his hand, attracting the attention of everyone in the room.
"Capsule Corps labs?" the King's eyes widened and even his furry ears twitched as this was a tall request. "Certainly, as the King, I have the authority to commandeer Capsule Corps' labs as they are just a private enterprise but… It would take a breathtaking project for me to exercise that authority given Capsule Corps' power and influence."
"We believe our project to be exactly that kind of project, King-san," the mullet man turned to his taller friend who deposited his briefcase onto the table and reached his hand over the handle and lock, preparing to reveal everyone its contents. Needless to say, every security guard in the meeting room jumped up and aimed their arms at the pair. "Please, before we reveal the contents of this briefcase to you, allow me to explain what you will see there. Make no mistake, just like you should be well-aware after having scanned it for firearms or explosives, it does not contain such frugal things. It contains only security."
"Security?" the King corrected his glasses while raising a furry ridge where his eyebrows would've been had his entire face not been covered in fur. "Security against what, exactly?"
"Saiyans…" the mullet-man smiled. "That rowdy alien bunch is raising a ruckus all the time. Not a day goes by without an incident, a brawl, some buildings or city blocks being leveled. Most of us that have accepted cybernetic conversion from Puri & Co still have memories of being linked to Puri & Co archives, it's become public knowledge that Saiyans have tried taking over our planet at least twice now. They've had sleeper agents here interfering with honorable martial arts competition from far before that… A single Saiyan girl destroyed the Red Ribbon Army entirely and left the entire western region a radioactive mess that had only recently cleared out. That same Red Ribbon army that took the entire world's forces and the funding from Capsule Corps to repel during the last war."
"It's that same Saiyan girl that stepped up to protect the King when the creature that carved the Devil sign attacked, didn't she?" Parbo challenged the mullet man with a glare. He was there when the green-skinned devil attacked and killed both him and his partner, carved his path through the royal security like nothing. Somehow, despite remembering dying quite well, Parbo ended up alive and waking up to work one year later. Then again, maybe it was a malfunctioning memory archive from after his conversion?
"I am not saying that this particular Saiyan girl is our enemy, I'm just trying to show you that if a single Saiyan girl matches the power of the entire world's military, we've got a massive security threat on our hands by letting the Saiyans into our fold. That is why we offer security," the mullet-man excused himself with a defusing gesture of shaking his hands out in front of him.
"And what exactly sort of security that is? How are we meant to protect ourselves from the Saiyans?" the King humored his guest.
"The only thing that has matched and even defeated a Saiyan in combat effectively has been an Artificial Human. That is why we need Artificial Humans of our own," the tall man holding the briefcase spoke up, likely feeling some pain in his back from having to stay leaned down over the table for so long and holding the briefcase in an opening position without actually opening it until his partner signaled for it.
"Artificial Humans? That's ludicrous!" Parbo's face shriveled and nearly melted like hot cheese in shock at what these two were suggesting. "It's only because of the help from the Saiyans that we've been able to fend these Artificial Humans off from taking over the world and converting all of us into their drones."
"Naturally, we are not proposing anything that reckless. We are suggesting a line of Artificial Humans under our complete control. If you are so terrified of Artificial Humans, you should know that Artificial Humans No. 17 and 18 are still unaccounted for. Wouldn't you feel much safer having a line of Artificial Humans of your own enforcing the King's justice?" the mullet-man shrugged with faked indifference on his face.
"How would we even learn to make these Artificial Humans? Should we hunt for No. 17 and 18 to see what they're made of? Dr. Puri is long gone from our planet and it is unclear where she is. I've spoken to Bulma from Capsule Corps about that matter during a meeting, Capsule Corps is open to working with the government, but they are absolutely adamant about shutting down any questions about where Dr. Puri had gone and what she's doing," the King wondered, approaching his end of the table to get a better look at the two jokers and their enigmatic briefcase.
"That's simple, we go to the original source of Artificial Human technology…" the mullet-man turned to his partner and nodded. With a mere flick, the braided giant opened the briefcase and let its lower half slam on the table while a balding human head of tanned skin, blue eyes, and bushy white mustache rolled about inside of the briefcase. The back of the head had long and lively white hair and the man's appearance suggested a rather advanced age. From the moment that light seeped into his container, the man's eyes came alive and began scanning the room.
"Hello, gentlemen, my name is Dr. Gero. Now, how about we make some goddamn Androids?" the rolling, talking head smiled after blinking as a sign of introduction and good manners.